


Walkabout

by nayanroo



Category: Stargate (1994), Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-08
Updated: 2011-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:22:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nayanroo/pseuds/nayanroo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An accident at a base set up by agents operating outside Homeworld Command and the SGC has thrown Sam Carter and Ba'al into another galaxy entirely - and put them on the trail of the Destiny, last heard from three years ago. In this part of the universe, things are not what they seem, and motivations are often not what meets the eye. Will they be able to find Destiny and return home? Or will they be stranded forever?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pilot

**Author's Note:**

> I wish there was an "everyone ever" tag, because that's really what this is going to be, I think - I'll keep updating lists and stuff as I go along, but I hope to bring in as many characters as I can, or at least mention them.

The gate stood quiescent on the surface of the planet. It had been placed there before the living memory of anyone there, and there were no stories passed down from recent generations. For most of those who used it – traders and the like – it had just always been there. They put in the symbols on the table-like device near the gate, and it took them where they needed to go.

Now, with a hum, the gate became active, the ring turning, stopping as a symbol lit up. One, two, three, nine symbols in all, and then with a whoosh, the gate activated.

But something was wrong. The normally stable, shimmering blue light of the open gate was flickering, looking like a transmission gone awry. It flickered, held a moment, and spat out one prone form. It rolled across the ground in front of the gate and came to a rest face-down. The wormhole flickered again, more urgently than before, spat out a second form. The flashes came faster and faster, the whine of unseen circuits building and building until, with a mechanical sigh, the wormhole disengaged and the predawn dimness took over again.

*

Everything hurt.

Her head felt twice the weight it should have been as she lifted it up from the sand, and the ice on the black BDUs had started melting through the moment she'd hit the ground, making her shiver as icy rivulets ran down her spine. Sam had been going through the gate for so long she rarely felt any ill effects anymore. A little queasiness at most... so now, she was shocked.

 _I'm getting too old for this_ , she thought, then shook herself and got to her hands and knees, brushing sand off her clothes. Had to keep moving, had to make sure they weren't being pursued.

That made her cast around for her traveling companion. She hadn't left Tantalus alone, and if she was now –

But there he was, pale under his tan as he got shakily to his feet. Ba'al looked just as bad as she felt, the tips of his hair and the creases in the clothes he wore frosted with ice. “Rough ride,” she called out. Ba'al started, then his eyes refocused and he nodded grimly.

“Unusual. Where did you send us?”

Sam was about to tell him about the agrarian society on a planet she knew to be friendly to Earth when it struck her – she'd landed on sand. In fact... looking around, she realized none of the landmarks she  _knew_ ought to be nearby the gate on P4X-694 were there at all. And unless the gate had been moved to a desert region on the planet, or some massive desertification event had occurred, the landscape of sand and sedimentary-looking rock outcroppings shouldn't have been there.

“Uh-oh...”

That got his attention. “What? I spent long enough on your benighted planet to know that is  _not_ a good sound.”

“We're not where I sent us,” she said. Ba'al stared at her like she'd grown another head, so she clarified. “This is _not_ the planet that goes with the gate address I'm sure I dialed. I don't know where we are.”

He muttered something in Goa'uld that sounded deprecating, and Sam glared at him. He ignored it. “First interrogation and torment at the hands of your species, now  _you_ get us  _lost_ somewhere in the galaxy. Do you receive  _training_ to botch things as badly as you have?”

“Shut up and get our gear together,” Sam said, gesturing menacingly with her P90 – which, luckily, had remained on its strap around her neck. “It's not my fault. Something must have happened to the wormhole when we dialed. It was pretty crazy there.”

“Couldn't be a misdial – “

“It's not. I know these coordinates.” Sam took off for the DHD several yards away, noting its altered design. So they were somewhere in the galaxy that hadn't been explored in a while, and she was stuck with a former System Lord. _Great_.

“Clearly you do not,” Ba'al shot back, nudging the black backpacks that contained all the gear she'd thought they would need for a brief stay while waiting for pickup on a planet with an agriculture-based society. The hat she'd crammed on his head while they were trying to get out of the base he dropped disdainfully on top of the packs. Sam glowered at him.

“No, the wormhole was unstable, remember? There must have been a power surge or something when I dialed that caused the wormhole to jump somewhere else – we've seen it before.”

Ba'al crossed his arms, clearly not believing her. “That only works if the gates are in close proximity.”

“Then we must be close.”

“What if those wonderful government agents show up? I do not particularly seek to be imprisoned in another cell.”

“Everyone at Tantalus is probably dead now,” Sam replied, feeling a slight pang. “There's no way they could have pulled the address so fast. The planet was breaking up.”

“Nonetheless, you Tau'ri are as tenacious as you are stupid.”

“Very inspiring,” she muttered. “Maybe when we get back to Earth you can... write a book...”

Ba'al, seeing only Sam staring blankly at the DHD, adopted an expression of smug superiority. “Do you need my help?” he asked archly. Sam snapped her eyes up, narrowing them. He wanted to be nasty, after she'd rescued him too? She could play his little game.

“If you think you can handle this, be my guest.”

“ _Handle_ it... Remarkable,” Ba'al gloated, sauntering around (he was still a little unsteady, so it wasn't as impressive as it could have been) to her side. “All those trips through the gate and you still cannot – “

It was almost comical for Sam to see him deflate so quickly. “Problems?” she asked sweetly. Ba'al narrowed his eyes.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“I'm just a female of the Tau'ri. You're the gate expert,” she said, stepping back. “You _can_ figure out those symbols we've never seen before, right? The ones on the DHD that we need to dial to get back home, _right_?”

“I have never seen these before.”

“Neither have I. So quit being so high 'n mighty and give me a hand.” She pushed him out of the way and knelt in front of the access panel, pulling out her tablet – right as three of the symbols on the DHD lit up and the inner ring of the gate began to spin.

“Colonel Carter,” Ba'al said, apprehension suddenly paramount in his voice. “Perhaps we had better...”

“Shut up and run!”

Shoving her tablet back into her pack, Sam bolted for the nearest dune backed up against the rocks. It wasn't much cover, but it would do better than no cover at all. Ba'al kept pace with her, sliding to his belly when they crested the first dune in the series. He hung back below the crest though, letting her crawl back up to peer over at the people coming through the gate. “It's not any men from Tantalus,” she whispered. “Just some locals, I guess.”

“Or agents in their guise,” Ba'al replied. “I saw those coming and going past my cell.”

Sam muttered, “Really inspirational,” but kept her eyes trained. The sun was setting – or rising, she couldn't be sure here - behind them, making now the best time they had to move away if they were going to or wanted to gain ground before nightfall. But she wasn't sure they should. “We should go ask them if they've heard of Earth.”

“It would be madness to do that!” Ba'al hissed. “You have no idea –“

“And we never will if we don't – “ Sam broke off, shaking her head. “You know what? Forget it. I don't need _your_ permission.” And with that, she stood up.

She wasn't noticed immediately; the people moving containers around by the gate were occupied in their tasks and apparently sure enough of their security not to post a guard. Sam had a moment to survey them, and was relieved that they didn't look like, or move like, military operatives. Even though Tantalus had only had ex-military and other rogues manning it, she couldn't ignore Ba'al's warning entirely, and there was a certain way that military people moved that she knew to look out for. None of them had it.

“Hey!” she called out, taking a sliding step down the dune. “Hey, I could use some information!”

Her response was a spray of fire – energy blasts, or something, with concussive force that knocked Sam off her feet. Rolling to one side, she scrambled for purchase on the slippery face of the dune. “I'm not an enemy!” she kept shouting, hoping someone had reason enough to call off the attack. She could hear Ba'al muttering in Goa'uld somewhere over the other side of the crest, and clawed her way to the top of it. “I just want to talk!”

“They're not listening, Colonel!” her unwilling companion shouted up at her. Sam was surprised Ba'al hadn't run off at the first shot, but it wasn't as though there were many places to hide here. He probably thought he was better off with her for protection. Irritated by the thought of being a human shield for a Goa'uld, Sam scrambled over the crest of the dune and slid down past him, grabbing her pack along the way.

“Better start running!” she shouted as the first shots hit the top of the next dune. Moving ducked over, Sam kept them in the troughs between dunes as much as she could. The people firing at them had the same kind of accuracy as the average Jaffa, so in that respect they were lucky, but they were also outnumbered and outgunned, and there was no cover, _and_ it was damned hard to run on loose sand. They were panting and sweaty after what must have only been a quarter of a mile, and the only solace was that their pursuers had to deal with it too, since she hadn't seen any kind of vehicles with the group at the gate.

Eyes peeled for a bolt-hole, Sam steered them toward what looked like another series of rock outcroppings. The ground here was rockier, easier to run on, and the two of them kept pace with one another as they skidded from one to the next, as the outcroppings became cliffs and they were finally scrambling up into a cut in the rock and flattening themselves on their stomachs, back from the edge as far as they could go. Sam cursed herself for the black BDUs and not the khaki ones, though how could she have known they'd end up on a planet not the one she'd dialed?

As they waited, Sam ran through those frantic few minutes (it had to have been a few minutes, though at the time it had felt much longer), replaying the address she'd put in, what had been going on right as they'd stepped through the gate. The address had been correct – she remembered seeing the glyphs on the computer screen – but somehow they'd ended up here.

“Colonel,” Ba'al murmured, nudging her arm, and Sam opened her eyes, and found she was looking right down on one of the men after them.

Neither she nor Ba'al dared to breathe. Her P90 was trapped under her, useless. All she could do was hope they didn't look up.

The canyon they'd run into went on past their hiding spot, and some of the men jogged down that way, calling out to each other in their strange language. It sounded familiar to Sam, but she didn't have Daniel's gift for parsing out the origins of a language. The man standing below them called out, someone else answered, and he started off after the others at a jog. Sam waited until he was around a bend in the canyon walls before getting carefully to her feet, as quietly as she could, and peering up the rock face.

“This shouldn't be too hard to climb,” she whispered, then winced. Her voice carried on the wind, even as quiet as she'd been. “We each take a pack and get over the edge, then make ourselves as flat as possible. Got it?”

“I am not—“

Sam grabbed the front of the BDU jacket he wore. “Look, I've had a really bad day so far and you've been the cause of most of it, so either you do as I say or I'm going to let those guys take you. Got it?”

Ba'al worked his jaw a moment, glaring at her, then made a little motion with his shoulder. “Up the cliff, then.” He reached up for a handhold but Sam jabbed him back.

“Me first,” she said. “So that way you can't run off when you get to the top.” She adjusted her pack and pulled herself up the first couple handholds.

“Where am I going to _go_?” she heard Ba'al mutter below her. “We are in the middle of a desert.”

They'd just started to hear the sound of the searchers returning when Ba'al reached the edge of the cliff and pulled himself over. Behind them, dunes and rocky outcroppings stretched as far as they could see, and the sun was getting more intense – it _had_ been dawn, then. Sam yanked Ba'al down to the sand beside her and they crawled away toward the first dune, not standing up until they were in the valley between it and the next one and the canyon, and the searchers, were out of sight.

“They weren't ours,” Sam said, taking a sip of her water and handing the canteen over to him. As irritating as he was, he'd only complain more if she tried to let him die of dehydration. “Guessing they're locals.”

“You cannot seriously think we'll have a pursuit.” Ba'al handed the canteen back when he was done and started trying to shake sand out of his hair. An astonishing amount collected on the shoulders of the jacket before he gave it up. “There was barely enough time for us to get through the gate.”

“We don't know what kind of data dumps they had set up,” Sam pointed out, heading toward the trailing edge of a dune perpendicular to their own. “They could have had a cloaked ship in orbit that collects every address dialed.”

“Their whole project was getting back to that ship you left your people on. It's preposterous to think they would have cared about anything past that address.”

“We didn't _leave_ them on the _Destiny_ , we just don't have a way of getting them back right now.” Sam ran a hand through her hair. Sand cascaded out. “We don't even know if any of them are still alive. Last contact was three years ago.” She crawled the last few feet, then pulled out her monocular to scan the horizon. “We're going to need to find a place to hole up for the hot part of the day. It already feels like it's around ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and this is only just past sunrise.”

She spied what she was looking for, about a kilometer distant. “There. That outcropping looks like it's got some caves in it. We can find one that'll be in the shade for most of the day.” She slid her hand onto the grip of her P90 and gestured with it. “Goa'uld first.”

Ba'al snorted, made a show of adjusting his shoulders under the weight of the pack, and started off across the sand in front of her. “You have an issue of trust, I believe,” he said. Sam glared at the back of his head.

“When it's _you_ , yeah, I do,” she replied. “If you were me, would you trust yourself?”

Ba'al pretended to think about this – she knew he was pretending because the answer was so damn obvious to the both of them. “Absolutely not. And yet it seems our circumstances require it.”

“Our circumstances aren't going to last beyond however long it takes us to wait for those guys to leave the gate area – we'll check back tonight – so we can figure out how to dial Earth. Then I'm going to personally supervise your extraction, and scour every corner of the galaxies in our reach to make sure there aren't more of you skulking around waiting to cause trouble.”

“So much trouble for one of me.”

Annoyed, she poked him with the business end of her P90, and he jumped. “I don't _trust_ you to be honest when you say there's only you left.”

They reached the rock outcropping in short order, but by then Sam had undone the top of her BDU, regretting the black set once more as the color absorbed heat. Ba'al complained about everything – sand in his hair, rocks in his shoes, that he was tired – and she was tired of listening to it as she knelt, reaching inside a likely alcove with her P90 and rattling it around.

“What are you _doing_?” Ba'al asked, not so much sounding curious as sounding like he was in the company of a lunatic.

“If you want some alien creature crawling into your pants and giving you a potentially venomous bite, go on ahead and get in,” she said. “I'm gonna be safer though, thanks.”

Satisfied with determining her chosen hidey-hole was clear of poisonous alien critters, Sam went into the low opening, unclipping her pack and holding it before her when it became clear she couldn't fit inside with it on. Ba'al came after her, and they found that the short passage opened into a larger area, big enough for one of them to stretch out comfortably at least. Sam dropped her pack where it'd be within arm's reach and gestured.

“You stay in here,” she said. “I'm going to keep watch.”

Ba'al was already making himself comfortable. How could he lounge when all he had was a backpack to lean on? Ugh.

“Don't get too comfy,” she muttered.

“Impossible when one is sitting on rock.”

“Do you really have a response for everything?”

He eyed her, smirking. “On that I am unsure. Nobody's tried everything.”

“Aren't you clever? I'm sure the guys working with you on Tantalus just _adored_ you.”

“Admittedly, their interpretation of tough love was somewhat different than mine.”

She shifted, nudged a shard of rock out from under her ass, then leaned back against the wall of the passageway. “What did they have you doing anyway? You were locked out of our system by the time we really started getting information together on dialing the ninth chevron, and even after Icarus, we had all Dr. Rush's notes and Eli Wallace's inputs, and what Dr. McKay came up with too. What did they need you for?”

“Insurance against the error produced by a Tau'ri working these equations?” Ba'al shrugged. “Every time they got it into their heads to question me, if one can call it that, it was a different topic. Astrophysics, astronavigation, stargate dialing programs and updates, DHD function...”

Sam mulled those over, but couldn't see a connection other than the ones they'd already made. “Too bad they never told you their plans.”

“Yes, well, that would be the cliché wouldn't it? Perhaps they simply wanted the pleasure of holding a System Lord captive. Not that I made it particularly easy on them.”

“Somehow that doesn't surprise me one bit,” she muttered, then said, “Look, you'd better rest up. I know they weren't exactly gentle with you there, and as much as I hate to admit it, I'm going to need your help figuring out how to get home. _Don't_ gloat,” Sam snapped, seeing his face. “As soon as we walk through the gate on Earth you're getting packed back off to the Tok'ra.” His laugh as he shifted, pillowing his head on the pack, irritated her further.

“As you say, then,” Ba'al replied. “It seems a fine reward for helping you get home. Why, it would be as though I was turning myself in.”

“Oh please,” she muttered, then settled in, eyes scanning the desert and the horizon beyond.

*

It was midafternoon when she heard it. The heat of the day had made her move more into the cool interior of the cave, and so she probably recognized it less quickly than she could have, but once she heard the distinctive whine of engines above the rising wind and shifting sands, she sat up straight and risked peeking out of the cave.

Sure enough, in the distance she saw the telltale curved profiles of two F-302s running a search grid, off in the direction the gate was in. Sam squeezed back in, getting as far into the cave as she could without losing line of sight. “Ba'al.”

He didn't respond, so she glanced back and saw he'd fallen asleep. Picking up one of the loose shards of rock that littered the floor of the passageway, she lobbed it at him. It struck him in the head and bounced off, and Ba'al startled awake.

“We've got company,” she said grimly.

He looked at her, offended. “You threw a rock at my _head_.”

“I didn't damage your pretty face. Get out here.”

He scrambled through the narrow passage and crouched beside her, following the direction she pointed him in. His eyes narrowed when he saw what it was she was pointing at. “So your friends came after us at last.”

“Sure looks like it.” Sam pushed him back through ahead of her, then sat against the wall opposite where he'd been napping. “I bet they found us because they pulled the address every time one was dialed.” He glared at her, and Sam couldn't help but smile sweetly at him, taking advantage of the chance to needle him about this. “Which one of us was sure that we would not be pursued?”

“There's no need to gloat,” Ba'al muttered. “Unless you enjoy double standards.”

“You just don't want to admit you were wrong.”

“You'll forgive me for it, I'm sure. You'll also forgive me if I say that is not what is important right now. Should we not be focusing on finding a way home?”

Sam sighed, glancing nervously at the mouth of the cave as she heard the F-302s make a closer pass, so close she could make a mental note that these ones bore no USAF markings, or indeed any markings at all. “Look, we can't do anything anyway until those guys are gone. We've got to wait until they go back to whatever ship brought them in. Then we figure out a way off this planet and back to Earth.”

*

“What do you mean, ' _disappeared?'_ ”

The captain of the USS _George Hammond_ took a deep breath. “We almost had a lock on her locator chip, General, but it suddenly disappeared before we could beam her aboard. The planet was breaking up, we had to get out of there before the ship was caught in the blast.”

Lieutenant General Jack O'Neill put his head in his hands, despite knowing that the time lag between Homeworld Command on Earth and the _Hammond,_ deep in another galaxy, would make an awkward pause. _Deep breaths,_ he reminded himself. The doctor had warned him about his blood pressure, and Sam had been after him—

“Okay, back up,” he said at last. “Tell me exactly how it happened.”

*

Twelve hours earlier, Colonel Daniel Crichton had been leaning over a display on the bridge of the _Hammond,_ brow creased as he listened to what Colonel Samantha Carter was saying.

“...you're sure?” he asked, when she'd finished. It sounded like something out of a conspiracy novel, like that Bourne one he was reading now. “I don't mean to doubt you, Colonel, but...”

“It sounds pretty far-fetched, I know,” Carter said, taking a deep breath. “And you're not gonna like this next part – I want to get Ba'al out with me.”

“What? Why?”

“For starters, so we can squeeze the location of any remaining clones out of him,” she said, and there was a note in her voice that said she'd like nothing more than to let him rot in his cell in the compound. “We'll turn him over to the Tok'ra when we're done.”

“What about the people on the base?”

“We'll let Command know about them and go from there. But all this suggests that they've got someone placed very high up in Homeworld Command, someone passing them information. We're going to have to be careful.”

“Right, of course,” Crichton said. “I'll beam down a locator beacon you can put on Ba'al—“

“No, we're going to get out by gate,” Carter cut in. “Here's the plan...”

But it had all gone belly up. Crichton had watched, horrified, as huge molten cracks opened up on the planet's surface, continually calling for Carter, but she'd either turned off her earpiece or wasn't able to answer (that one chilled him utterly). He'd been able to get a lock on her signal through the interference generated by the breakup of the planet, but before he'd been able to give the order to beam her aboard, the signal lock had been lost, and minutes later, the planet began spitting chunks of crust off into space and he'd been forced to escape.

*

“And you just _let_ her go?” General O'Neill said, voice ice-cold. It went well with the trickles of ice water going down his spine, he thought. Sam, his Sam...

Well, not his. She'd never belong to anyone, and they weren't official either, but, well, they could keep secrets.

“She'd insisted, sir,” Colonel Crichton said. “I'm sorry. I should have just gotten her out of there and not gone along with her plan. I just didn't have the authority to tell her no, and...”

“...the thought of telling Colonel Samantha Carter, former member of the flagship SG team among other posts, not to do something wasn't one you were comfortable with.” This was the problem all of them ran into; some people were just too in awe of them to argue. That kind of thing was dangerous, and now Sam could be dead because of it, but there was little to be done about it. They were heroes, whether or not they felt like it. “You used your best judgment, Colonel. I can't fault you on that.”

“Scans did indicate that the gate was active one more time before the planet broke up entirely, so maybe we lost signal lock because she went through,” Colonel Crichton supplied helpfully. “We don't know if she had Ba'al with her.”

“She had her mind set on it, Colonel,” O'Neill said, setting his travel mug of coffee down on a coaster. It was from Banff, when they'd met up at that lake up there for a weekend. “Undomesticated equines couldn't drag her off.”

“...sir?”

“...never mind,” O'Neill muttered. “Look, you'd better get search parties out to all the gates in the nearby systems, not just the one she intended to go to. She would have contacted you from there by now if she could have, something must have happened in transit. Find her, Colonel.”

“Of course, General. And what about the people on Tantalus—?”

“I've got to prepare a report on that.” O'Neill ran a hand through his short gray hair, making it stuck up all over. He hated writing these kinds of reports, or any reports really. “Just focus on finding Carter and whoever she's got with her, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir. I'll report back as often as I can.”

“Do that.”

“ _Hammond_ out.”

The transmission screen went dark, and O'Neill stared at it a long moment before putting his head in his hands. They were still calloused and tanned, but he could feel it as he ran them over his face; they were going soft, just like the rest of him. This whole desk job thing really hadn't worked out for him.

It had been eight years since he'd been bumped up here from SGC, O'Neill thought as he turned to his laptop and reluctantly began to sift through the information in the data dump from the _Hammond_. Maybe it was time to really retire. Seriously, this time. Nothing could pull him back to active duty anymore, someone younger and smarter – maybe even Carter herself, maybe that Sheppard guy who'd been on Atlantis – could take over this whole show. He and Sam could be serious about what they had.

That last thought made him smile a bit, and that bolstered his hope on the whole. He'd know, somehow, if she were gone. You didn't get to be practically family with someone in your unit without developing a kind of sense about them.

She'd be back. He hoped.

*

Sam lay on her belly on top of the outcropping they'd come to, as far up as she could climb. To her left, a broad shoulder of rock was shadowed against the brilliant colors of the sunset, fading quickly into the indigo of night coming in on the west. Peering north in her monocular, Sam followed a telltale point of light down until it disappeared into the horizon. Where it disappeared, there was a slight golden glow. A settlement, some kind of spaceport or city or something. That was good.

They'd left the cave as the sun started to go down – according to her chrono it marked nine hours since they'd arrived on-planet, though the local time was still set to the planet Tantalus had been on. She'd been cautious, and even Ba'al had ceased his usual quips and mocking and walking in tense silence beside and a little to the front. She didn't think he'd run, but still kept a hand on her P90. With him, nobody could be too sure.

The gate had been deserted, and Sam had taken out her tablet and gotten to work. Ba'al had sullenly taken her handheld. He was still down there, tapping away at the screen with the stylus and still quite irritated – she was pretty sure he'd put the stylus _through_ the screen if he kept tapping commands out so hard.

“Hey,” she called down, scooting around on top of the rock so she could peer down at him. “Don't break my stuff.”

Ba'al glared up at her. The glow of the screen was providing more light than the sun, at this point; it lit his face from the bottom, throwing his scowl into sharp angles. “Then I suggest you stop fooling around doing whatever it is you think you are doing and come down.”

“Like you _want_ my help. I'm doing something useful. What are you doing down there, playing Solitare? Shouldn't your great intellect have solved this issue by now?”

Ba'al snorted, setting the tablet down on top of the DHD. “This thing is useless. Either the coordinate system is in another programming language entirely from what is used in dialing devices from this galaxy, or this tablet is incapable of decrypting it so we can determine where we are.” He caught her eyes and narrowed his own. “Frankly I am inclined to think there is an equal chance of both.”

Sam counted to five in her head, then replied, “So basically we have no way of using coordinates from the DHD to determine where we are in the galaxy?”

“If we are even in the same galaxy.”

Something about the way he said that made Sam's blood run cold. “What makes you think we aren't?”

Ba'al leaned against the DHD, crossing his arms. It was one of the more thoughtful poses she'd seen him in, and something told Sam he wasn't mocking anything, at least for the moment. Of course, she was proved wrong when he started talking. “Having perused what you so generously gave me—“

“What you _stole._ ”

“—and from what I have been able to glean from the material relayed back from the _Destiny_ that I was given as light reading material during my unfortunate incarceration, there are certain... theories I have about the gate system as set up by the Ancients.”

“Such as?”

“That the designs of the gates, DHDs, and accompanying databases shifted over time, became more refined as more time was spent on them. Compare it to you Tau'ri and your computers; I am told the first ones your species devised took up rooms, and now you have laptops that have myriad more functions than those early computers ever did. I am certain within a few more decades you may even have what could pass for decent equipment.”

“Ba'al—“

“The point, Colonel, is that technology changes over time. Based on what your people have been saying, the gates encountered by the _Destiny,_ including the one on it, are of an earlier design than the ones we know, and the ones in the Pegasus galaxy are a later model still. The technology was refined and improved with every iteration.”

Sam paused, letting her monocular dangle loosely in her hand. “So what you're saying is that this is like Stargate 1.0? This is the whole thing at its earliest, most basic form, and that's why it's got those—“ she indicated the dots-dashes symbols on the gate and DHD “—instead of any constellations we can recognize, and that the coordinate system and navigational systems are based more on mathematics?”

Ba'al appeared to consider this a moment, then shrugged a shoulder. “I suppose, yes.”

Sam sat up and ran a hand through her hair. “And we couldn't use anything the original Icarus project worked out because we don't know if this planet has a naquadria core... and we don't want it to potentially explode under us... _and_ we don't know if we need to.”

“Not to mention you did not have the foresight to load it onto this device, but yes, I would rather it not. We will not so readily escape a second time.”

“So... what?”

“You have been watching the ships to see where they land, have you not? Where there are ships, there is undoubtedly a port of some kind. We will obtain what we need there.”

Sam climbed down off the rock. “I don't know if it'll be that simple. We'll be marked for foreigners the moment we show our faces. Not to mention we don't have any local currency, no idea if we even speak the same _language_...”

“Then do you propose we simply sit here and wait for the next group of people to come through that gate?” Ba'al said, arching his brows. “Or we could see if more of your charming little friends come looking for us again? I'm sure they'll not give up so easily if they found us already.”

“Enough,” Sam snapped, snatching up her pack. “Put that away, we're moving out. It's at least twenty-five miles and probably more to the place all those ships are landing at, and I'm not going to listen to you complain and mock me the whole way.”

“Clearly you do not know me very well, Colonel.”

“I don't want to. Come on, we've got to cover some serious ground tonight and find a place to stay through the day tomorrow.”

When night fell it was sudden; one moment, it seemed, Sam was walking a bit behind Ba'al, the last of the daylight glinting off the metal pieces of his pack, and the next they were walking in darkness. Day was nothing more than a thin golden line on the horizon, shrinking fast. The sky was a dark, velvety black, scattered with stars. Sam couldn't help but get lost in them. Even now after over a decade of traveling among them, she was still able to find them wondrous.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ba'al looking up at the stars every so often, too. She wondered what he saw; his empire spreading out across the universe, probably. Something dickish like that. Perhaps by mutual unspoken agreement, neither one of them broached the subject that had been growing like a shadow in their minds since they picked themselves up off the sand in front of the gate.

 _What happens if there's no way back_ ?

*

“Mr. President, I need to talk to you.”

Uncomfortable in his dress uniform, Jack kept himself from fidgeting too much as he waited for the President to escort his aides and various other visitors out and shut the door. Henry Hayes was someone Jack liked and respected, however; he'd done a lot for the Stargate program over both his terms, and had a lot of the kind of common sense that didn't come up in politicians very often.

“What is it, General?” he asked, gesturing for Jack to sit after he'd taken a seat on one of the couches himself. Jack handed over the President's copy of the file and spoke as he watched the other man thumb through it.

“Well, sir, we've got a bit of a problem.”

“You mean bigger than a whole city that nobody can know about mucking up the works for shipping into and out of San Francisco Bay?”

“Oh yeah. This is bigger than that.”

“Better tell me about it, then.”

For the next half hour, Jack filled the President in on everything he knew; about how their discovery of moles within the SGC had led to a discovery of a secret ninth-chevron project led by rogues from the oversight committee operating outside any jurisdiction. They had found a planet with a naquadria core, and were intending to dial _Destiny,_ doing what they all thought that the military ought to have done years ago, before the people stranded there had been forced to go into stasis for the long trip between galaxies.

“I remember reading about that,” President Hayes said. “Didn't they do that because power levels on the ship were low? They needed all the power they had just to cross between galaxies?”

“We were told they shut down all but minimal life support. Enough to keep the ship going, and everyone in stasis pods, but not enough to sustain more than one person at a time.” Jack rested his elbows on his knees, leaning forward on them. “We wanted to rescue them, that's why we brought in Rodney McKay to work on that pesky issue of planets blowing up whenever we dialed the ninth chevron, but... well, you know what happened to that.”

“Yes. So tell me about what happened at this so-called Tantalus base.”

“Well, when we found out about them we sent Colonel Carter and the USS _George Hammond_ to go check it out, see what kind of operation they were running... and to shut it down if necessary. Except things went backwards from the start. Colonel Carter found out that they had a rather special prisoner – Ba'al.”

President Hayes looked up sharply. “Didn't we take care of all of him years ago?”

“We thought we did, Mr. President, but I guess we missed one. Colonel Carter reported they had one, either the real one or a clone, and were using, ah, extraordinary means to extract information they could use for their project.”

“He knew about it?”

“Carter's guessing they used more general knowledge – at least, that's what she sent back in her last report from the planet. She also said she was going to get him out before they could do something stupid like a dialing attempt.”

Hayes raised his brows. “I'm guessing by your face she wasn't entirely successful in that.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“When you get to be President, Jack, you learn how to read people.”

“I hope I never get to be President, Mr. President.”

“Can't say I blame you. So what happened?”

“Colonel Carter was in the middle of extracting herself and the snakehead and they tried to dial. _Hammond_ 's commander, Colonel Crichton, said they had a lock on Carter's locator chip but lost it. He thinks maybe they were able to dial another address and get out, or at least she was able to. If anyone could escape from an exploding planet, it's Carter. I've ordered Colonel Crichton to search nearby systems, but after talking with others on this, we think there might be a problem.”

“...oh?”

“Well... they used big fancy words, but the gist of it is that the planet's naquadria core sent a huge burst of energy into the gate, and that can cause the wormhole to... jump.”

President Hayes sat back. “So Colonel Carter might not be in the search area, she might be injured from whatever was going on right before she got through the gate – if she did – and she might be in the company of a Goa'uld?”

“That sounds about right, Mr. President.”

“Do what you can, Jack, I'll do what I can to support you if you need it. I know you don't like to leave your people behind, and if anyone can get Carter, and maybe the people on the _Destiny_ back, it's you. Round up as many of these rogue agents as you can and bring them in, see what they know. And keep me in the loop, will you?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

*

When he got back to the office, Daniel was waiting for him. Seeing his longtime friend always managed to cheer Jack up a bit; it had really been too long since the whole gang had gotten together, too. He always meant to head out to Cheyenne Mountain and dial up Chulak, go see how Teal'c was doing, but never seemed to be able to.

“I heard about Sam,” Daniel said, after getting through the required gauntlet of pleasantries Jack half-jokingly demanded people use. “I'm sorry, Jack.”

“Quit talking about her like she's gone forever,” he said, handing Daniel a cup of coffee. The good stuff, not the usual office swill. “She's just off somewhere, that's all. Stranger things have happened to us.”

Daniel considered that a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, you're right there.”

Jack sat heavily, tossing his jacket over the back of the chair. “Did you hear she might have Ba'al along for the ride?”

“I thought we extracted him?”

“I thought we did too. He's like a cockroach.”

Daniel leaned on the desk, watching the steam rise from his cup for a moment. “Look, Jack, I know I'm only really a consultant for the Stargate program anymore but I can tell you want to get back out there and go looking for her. I just wanted to let you know that if you want to, me, Vala, and Teal'c are right behind you.”

Jack sighed. “I know, Daniel. That's the part that sucks about having a desk job – I can't go out and make sure all my people come back.”

They were both quiet a long moment. He could feel Daniel staring at him frankly, and knew what the other was thinking – that Sam wasn't just one of his people, that they'd had an on-again, off-again relationship since he moved up to Homeworld Command depending on where she was and how busy he was, that one day they'd both retire and then everything could get to how it was supposed to be.

“Do we have any idea where they went? Was anyone able to pull a gate address, or scan for Sam's locator chip?”

“Not that we've been told, and they haven't found anything yet or they'd have told us.” Jack resisted slamming a fist on the desk in frustration. But of all of them, Daniel had known him the longest, and knew what to look for.

“If she's out there, she'll be okay,” he said bracingly. “She'll find her way home, Jack. Just trust her.”

“I do, Daniel.” Jack shook his head. “I do.”

*

Sam tucked away her monocular again. False dawn was starting to turn the western horizon a slightly lighter shade, infusing the night with a kind of cool gray. She felt the events of the last twenty-four hours keenly in every bone in her body, and knew she needed to rest – that they _both_ needed to rest – but was torn between that and pressing on.

“If we keep walking through the cooler parts of the day we'll be there,” she said. Ba'al gave her a look she didn't need any special training to interpret.

“We have been walking all night,” he protested.

“And we've barely made it halfway, and we need to find a place to hide out during the heat of the day,” she countered. “Both of us are coming up on our limits – don't look at me like that, I can see it – and we need to rest up. I get the feeling that getting a ship once we reach this place isn't going to be as easy as you think it'll be. Either way we're going to need to be at the top of our game to figure out a way home.”

It always amazed her how quickly he was able to shoot his mouth off in response to things. “You mean _I_ will need to be at my peak. The top of your game, as you say, is barely mediocre.”

Her irritation and exhaustion rapidly catching up to her, Sam barely managed to squash the urge to make him eat sand; instead she settled for getting in real close, eyes narrowed. “Look, neither of us want to be here, and I _really_ don't want to be stuck here with _you,_ but since that's where we are right now, we're going to have to work together., and that means you play by my rules because I'm the one with the gun. Got it?”

Ba'al nodded his head after a moment, but there was a defiant look in his eyes that she didn't like one bit. Still, she let him step back, and gestured with the P90.

It was the stress of the situation, she told herself as the sky continued to lighten and the ground turned more stony under their boots. It was the fact she'd been up for over a standard Earth day at this point, she was potentially stranded with a former enemy who insisted on having a reply to every damn thing said and continually insulted everything from her intelligence to her hairstyle, she was hungry, she was thirsty, she missed Jack, there was sand everywhere, she just wanted to go home...

 _Stop it_ , Sam told herself sternly.  _You never got anywhere since you got on this crazy ride by feeling sorry for yourself. Realistically, Ba'al might offer at least a decent chance at helping you get home._

“Or I could find some ruby slippers,” she muttered. Ba'al looked back over his shoulder.

“Are you losing yourself, Colonel?” he asked conversationally.

“Nope,” she replied shortly, taking the lead. “Just as sane as ever.”

All around them were tall, wind-carved monoliths, sculpted into fantastical flowing shapes. The stone was orange-red, the colors stratified and almost glowing in the dawn. In some places the towers almost seemed to have familiar shapes; the figurehead of a ship, a creature with wings outstretched. It was beautiful.

But they didn't have time to be sightseeing. With a sigh, she turned her radio on and turned to Ba'al. “We need a place to hide out,” she told him. “Look for anything big enough to hide both of us – an undercut, an alcove, anything. Radio me when you do.”

“You are trusting me to go off on my own?”

“I don't trust you at all,” she replied, smiling sweetly at him again. “But we're in the middle of a desert. Where could you possibly go?”

Letting him stew over having his own words thrown back at him, Sam strode off, checking around the base and a reasonable climbing distance up the monoliths. She could feel it starting to get hot already, and unzipped her jacket a bit. If they couldn't find a cave or something like that, they could just move around one of the monoliths that was in a cluster with others. Some of them had broad, flat tops, they'd shield somewhat from aerial passes. Just as she was thinking that might have to be their course of action, her radio crackled.

“ _Colonel Carter_ , _I believe I've found something. Head west of the direction you took_.”

“Copy that,” she replied, and started off, passing the place they'd entered the field at and continuing on. Every so often she heard the sound of falling stone; it wasn't until she realized there was a pattern to it that she radioed Ba'al. “That you throwing rocks?”

“ _Perceptive, as usual.”_

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“ _Only some of them_.”

Rolling her eyes, she followed the sound of the rocks, weaving in and out of the pillars until she found Ba'al seated outside a low, lipped overhang at the base of a particularly wide and fantastically carved pillar, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

“That doesn't look big enough for _one_ of us,” Sam said warily.

“It is. I looked inside – checking for alien creatures, obviously. It is unoccupied.”

“ _That_ I trust,” Sam said, dropping to her hands and knees to crab-walk in to what wasn't so much a cave as something like an undercut on a stream bank. Ba'al came after her.

“Why that, and nothing else?”

She sat back against the wall after taking off her pack. It was tight, but it would be cool and protected. “Because you always look out for yourself first. And since you know you have to stay with me or risk getting bullets in the back, you made sure to check.”

Ba'al sat next to her, unzipping his jacket. She'd misjudged his shirt size, Sam thought idly. That black shirt was obscenely tight across the chest. Then she made a mental sound of disgust and folded her own jacket behind her lower back, getting comfortable. Ba'al was running his hand over the rocks and sand that made up the floor of their little hidey-hole.

“The ground is different here,” he said. “The sand feels almost damp.”

“There must be water underground,” Sam replie, digging in her pack for the food bars she'd stashed in their packs. “They're not exactly appetizing,” she said, handing him one. “But one of you seemed to enjoy them, so I'm running with the assumption that you will too.”

“As _suming_ things about me – any of me – is never a wise thing, Colonel,” he replied, but took the bar and tore into it with relish. Sam shook her head; save for the different setting and the circumstances, it was a very familiar scene.

“Well, good to know you all have healthy appetites,” she said, then pulled out one for herself and sat chewing on it for a minute. “Look, I shouldn't have snapped at you back there – I'm tired and can't think right. And before you start gloating about getting an apology – don't. Don't think this means you've gained any ground with me, either.”

“I have no such illusions,” Ba'al said. “But really, Colonel, conceding something is a bad thing to do with a prisoner, if that is indeed what I am.”

“Don't kid yourself about _that_ , either.”

“I have no need to.”

Sam sat forward so she could look him right in the eye, feeling her irritation rising again. “Look, if you're going to—Ba'al?”

A strange look had come over his face as she'd started speaking – not haughtiness or superiority or anything of the sort but a startled look. It was an expression that changed to surprise and then something like fear as he was pulled    
_backwards_   
through the rock wall of the alcove – rock that suddenly looked a lot less solid.

“Hey!” she shouted, scrabbling around to get purchase and grab one of his legs that was disappearing into the newly-revealed passageway. She could hear him shouting, one of his feet grazed her temple as he kicked frantically, trying to free himself from whatever was pulling him in. “Hold still, I can't get a hold—“

But Ba'al was disappearing through the 'rock,' first his knees, then his ankles and feet swallowed up. Sam only waffled a moment before she took a deep breath (why, she wasn't sure) and followed him in.

It was a passageway, a cool, smooth tunnel carved into the same kind of rock as the pillars outside. Ahead, she could hear dragging sounds under the noise Ba'al was making as he was pulled along. “I'm right behind you!” she tried shouting. “I'm following wherever you're being taken!”

She heard a scraping, then Ba'al shouted back, “Samantha, watch out!”

Sam scrunched up her face. What the hell was he doing? “For  _what_ ?”

“The floor—“ There was a horrible thud, then suddenly Ba'al stopped yelling. Sam froze, wondering if she should start crawling backwards.

“Ba'al?” she called out. Silence; somewhere the sound of dripping water. Cautiously she crawled forward, feeling the tunnel widen around her until she could reach up and not be able to touch the ceiling of it with her fingertips. She got to her knees, and when stretching up still didn't yield any rock, she stood, pulling out her small LED flashlight and shining it around. The chamber was roundish, the floor and walls sculpted – but not by water or wind. She ran her hand over it.

 _This has been carved by hand,_ she realized.  _Someone's taken a lot of care with it too. But there aren't any exits or entrances except mine. What did he mean about the floor?_

Looking down, she shone her light at the floor of the tunnel. Scattered with sand, perfectly smooth...

There was a noise behind her, and Sam spun around, but it was too late – the floor had gone transparent, just like the rock had before, and she fell into darkness.

*

The glow of the screen lit up the analyst's face like something out of a spy movie. It was a little like that, she thought; conspiracies within conspiracies. Not that she was privy to the things that the higher-ups did, even though she knew they were there. Her job was simple, and she was good at it. “Still receiving telemetry from them, sir.”

“Excellent. Maintain a watch on their signals, and notify me if they leave the planet,” said the man with the lined face who often came in to look over their work.

“Yes, sir,” the analyst replied, and turned her attention back to two blinking markers, hovering over a planet in a galaxy nobody had yet named, and that nobody save for them – and the two they tracked – even knew existed.


	2. The Woman in the Rock

Farther away from Earth than any machine or Tau'ri had ever been, the _Destiny_ dropped out of hyperspace.

Her hull bore the marks of battle – carbon scoring, holes in time-scarred stretches of plate.It was not the first time she had seen battle, certainly, but the last time – before the long, dark journey between galaxies had begun – had been the worst. _Destiny_ had almost been brought down, and if she had failed, the lives of the people she bore within her would have been forfeit too.

But they were more cunning than they had seemed at first.They had found her stasis pods, and they had brought them online.They had even solved the problem of the malfunctioning pod, deciding who would be tasked to stay awake and try to fix it; in fact, it had been the kind boy who had grown so much since coming aboard.They had all grown so much.

Eli had passed the test put before him.He had deserved it.

 _Destiny_ 's sublight engines engaged slowly, more ponderously than normal, and she banked.Computers on board kicked in to calculate what was needed.Energy – repairs – other programmed and scheduled tasks.But without energy first, the other two were impossible.

The light of a bright yellow star washed over the bow and brightened her deserted bridge.

 _Destiny_ had made it to another galaxy.

*

The one good thing about Atlantis being on Earth now, Daniel thought, was that he could visit as often as he wanted.While he was no longer officially part of the Stargate program, he was certainly not barred from its installations and still had his clearance.Vala enjoyed seeing the Ancient city, besides, always leaning forward to look through the window of the puddlejumper that had picked them up at Travis AFB and brought them over the Bay Area, cloaked.Just like she was doing now.

This time, at least, he was on business.Jack hadn't asked him for it but he'd decided to look through the archives in the city (even though it meant wrangling with that damned AI again) for anything that could help.He andteams of other researchers had combed the place for information following what had happened on Icarus, but then their search had been elsewhere.Daniel intended to take things in a different direction this time.But there was something he needed to do first.

Sheppard landed them smoothly in the jumper bay, lowering the ramp as the engines spun down.“Thanks for the lift,” Daniel said as he unclipped his harness and stood.Vala had already skipped out, off to get into some new trouble or explore other parts of the city or something.Sheppard shook his hand when Daniel offered it.

“Always happy to oblige,” he replied.“Beats flying politicians around like I usually do.”

“Can't imagine _why_ this would be more fun.How're things going here, John?”

“Oh, same old, I guess.”The colonel walked down the ramp beside him and they left the hangar together.“They're talking about moving us out into open waters, international waters or something.Just so we stop blocking ships and making life difficult for Port Authority and the secrecy of the program when captains start complaining.I kinda miss having nothing but ocean around for miles, to tell you the truth.It'll feel right if it happens, though it won't be quite the same as if we were on another planet.”

For many, Atlantis had lost some of its appeal once back in familiar waters, so to speak.While many remained – the myriad Ancient labs having much to do with it – some had also left.Some of the offworlders that had joined up with the mission stayed, not quite ready to try and blend in with Earth society, but the overall impression was that there was a lot less activity than there had been when he’d come here with SG-1 looking for information.

“I'm here to talk to Dr. McKay,” Daniel said.“Any idea where he is?”

“Let me find out.”Sheppard put a hand to his earpiece and turned away to talk into it; while he did that, Daniel grabbed Vala as she passed by and leaned over.

“Don't break or steal anything, this is all government property.”

She pouted, though they both knew that this was mostly just done out of tradition and nostalgia than out of actual worry for her borrowing interesting bits of technology without asking.“Still?”

“Yep.”

Vala heaved a sigh, hanging around as Sheppard turned back.“He's in a lab out on Pier 3, fifth level.Take the transporter room over there, through those doors, it'll get you there faster.When you get to Pier 3, head down to the T-junction and go left.”He sketched a salute at Vala.“Hey.”

Daniel left the two of them to whatever trouble they intended to get into and made his way to the transporter. It was still an odd way of getting around, but the city was huge and made walking out the question if he wanted to get there within the next hour.A few minutes later he was walking down a corridor that looked out into the bay between Piers 3 and 4, with a wall and doors every so often on one side and huge windows on the other.Sheppard hadn't told him what room to look for, but Daniel didn't really mind wandering a bit.Besides, when he heard a raised, irritated voice, he figured he was on the right track and followed the sound to its source.

“Be _careful_ with that,” Dr. McKay was saying as Daniel walked in.Two lab assistants were lifting some piece of anonymous technology off the workbench where it had been presumably since the Ancients had left it there.“We're still not sure what it does and if one of you breaks it...”

“We never will,” one of the assistants muttered half under her breath.McKay was about to round on her when Daniel cleared his throat.

McKay jumped, but recovered well.“Dr. Jackson, good to see you.”

“You too, Dr. McKay,” Daniel said.“How's Jennifer?”

He couldn't miss the way the man puffed up, just a little.“She's fine.She's helping kids on a supply mission to one of the planets trying to recover from Ori attacks.Where's Vala?”

“Staying out of trouble, I hope.”Though she had mellowed out a lot since they'd taken care of what they'd thought to be the last of the Ba'als, Vala still had a head for causing a stir.Old dogs, new tricks.“Hey, I needed to tell you that you're being called to Washington.Homeworld Command needs to talk to you about a situation.”

“What happened with Sam – Colonel Carter, I mean – I figured they'd want me there.”

The one downside of all of them being so close, sharing the experience of going offworld and regularly putting their lives in danger and being unable to tell much of anyone about it, was that in such a tight-knit group news traveled fast.“You're flying back this evening.When Jennifer gets back, General Landry will let her know what's going on so she can join you if she wants.”

“Good,” McKay said, sounding distracted as he watched one of the Science and Engineering personnel carefully slide some bit of unknown, strange-looking technology into a foam-lined case.When it was safe he turned his attention back to Daniel.“You're not coming along?”

“I'm going to say here and do some research on the nine-chevron gate addresses.We think Sam might have been able to get through at the last minute but she's on none of the surrounding planets with gates and hasn't called in from any of the safe planets with addresses everyone's told to memorize.Maybe she accidentally got sent to the _Destiny_.”

McKay crossed his arms.“She would have contacted us on the communication stones by now.”

“Maybe they were damaged or maybe she's hurt, or they shut down all life support in that area... or maybe there's more than one nine-chevron address.”

“But how would she know it?”

Daniel stared out the window, watching the waves lap at the pier with the city beyond.“Maybe she wasn't the one who dialed it,” he replied quietly.

“ _That_ isn't a happy thought.”

“Neither is the thought of Sam being trapped somewhere and unable to dial home.I'm not sure what we'll turn up here, we pretty much went through everything when we were trying to get everyone back from the _Destiny_ , but I hate sitting around while she's in danger.”He didn't add in the part where it was thought that Ba'al – or one of his clones – was with her.McKay would fret enough.“At least we know if we can figure out where she went, and if it's a nine-chevron address, we can dial it.”

“Colonel Carter's tough though,” McKay replied, though his voice cracked a little.Putting on a brave face wasn’t something he did with everything, but he’d always had a soft spot for Sam.“She'll be all right.”

*

 _Put those on and come with me – I'm getting us both out of here before they do something stupid._

She was running down a corridor and he was behind her, their backpacks rustling and jingling ridiculously loudly in the quiet of the base.Whoever made these things really hadn't designed them for stealth.

There was a vibration under her feet, and with a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach Sam knew exactly what that meant – they were going through with it, she'd waited too long, she'd killed them all—

Sam sat bolt upright, hands flying out for Jack, for anyone or anything to hold to, but her fingers only met well-worn blankets and a lumpy, musty mattress.Nightmares were part and parcel of doing what she did, but that didn't make them any easier when they happened.She should have anticipated that the first chance she got to sleep after all that had happened at Tantalus base, she'd dream about it.

But she hadn't gone to sleep.She'd fallen... and then...

Nothing.

 _Calm down_ , Sam told herself. _You're alive, and as far as potential prison cells go, this isn't bad._ Putting a hand to her throbbing head, she pushed the blankets away and discovered that she was wearing some kind of white roughspun tunic and pants.Her BDUs and tac vest were neatly folded on a small chest at the foot of the bed, and her pack rested beside them.At least she still had most of her stuff, even if she couldn't see the P90.Maybe her captors were like the Nox.

Swinging her legs over the bed, Sam slipped her feet into a pair of plain white shoes that fit her perfectly.Across from her, she noticed, was another bed, another chest, another set of BDUs and a pack.The covers were tossed back.

 _Great,_ she thought. _Ba'al is loose_.Thinking of him like a stray dog made her smile, enough to try and get up.She managed it with only a little bit of grunting and a particularly gross-sounding series of pops up her spine.No injuries to speak of, Sam thought as she took stock of herself.In fact, she felt pretty good.As good as a human marooned in some unknown scrap of space could feel, anyway.

The faint sound of conversation reached her ears from down the passageway leading out of the chamber, and so Sam quickly changed into the BDUs, left off the tac vest, and made her way down the passage, which was lit every few feet with some kind of strange, glowing globe that appeared to float in midair.No bars, no indications to her that this was a prison.Things were looking up.

She heard Ba'al before she could see anything but a brighter glimmer on the stone in a different hue than the glowing spheres.His accented voice rose and fell in conversation, unintelligible most of the time but a distinct enough timbre that she could pick it out.Another bend in the passageway brought her out into the cavern the voices came from, the light of a strangely smokeless fire glittering in the crystals on the walls.There were several branching passages going off this cavern; as she passed one, she could hear the sound of rushing water.It had been fainter before; now it sounded close.How long ago had it been that they'd talked about the damp sand above?It seemed like ages ago, but Sam didn't have any way to check; her watch was among the missing items.

“You're awake.”

Successfully derailed from her thoughts, Sam turned and saw the speaker was a woman, dressed in the same sort of clothes Sam had woken up in.At first glance she didn't look any older than Sam was, but after long enough traveling through the gate, Sam didn't believe that for a second.Something about this woman was _old_.

“I was wondering when you'd join us,” the strange woman continued.“Your handsome friend here recovered relatively quickly, which was why I had him grabbed first – Goa'uld have a tendency to do that, if I recall correctly, which I usually do.”

Ba'al had been relaxed with his usual smirk in place until she'd identified his species.“I did not tell you what I was,” he snapped, eyes narrowing.“You said you did nothing to us while we were unconscious.”

“I didn't have to,” the woman said with a smile that was improbably wide.“I know there are two of you in that body.You look like someone to lead – leaders do have a certain way about them, you know.And you're quite attractive.You all but have 'I am Goa'uld' tattooed on you.”Leaving him to sulk a moment, the woman turned her attention to Sam, who was torn between the idea that something here was completely and utterly _off_ , and laughing at Ba'al's reaction.“You are a human, of course.Nothing particularly special about you, save your mind and your tenacity.”

“Gee, thanks,” Sam muttered.

“Don't be offended, dear,” she replied.“I think you've more than proven your worth is oftentimes greater than the pretty boy here, hm?”

She turned away, and Sam took a moment to give Ba'al a superior look.He was looking murderous.

“I suppose you're both wondering what it is I want from you,” the woman said, turning back with something in her hand now, “Considering I've brought you here and insisted on dressing you how I like – though I see _you_ don't seem to care for it,” she told Sam.

“Actually I am wondering just who you are at _all_ ,” Ba'al replied silkily, as Sam was preoccupied with trying to figure out what it was the woman had in her hand.“Since you seem to know so much about the both of us.”

The woman grinned impossibly wide again.“My name doesn't really matter,” she replied.“I am just the woman in the rock.I see things in the rest of the galaxy from here… how doesn’t matter, Carter, I can see the question on your face already.”

“How do you know my name?”

The woman smiled and pointed at Sam’s chest.Preparing to be offended, she looked down – and saw the strip of Velcro with her name on it. _Carter_.Oh, right.

Ba’al was smirking at her still when the woman resumed talking.“I saw that you two were coming my way and, well, thought I would offer my help.”

“You helped us by _abducting_ us?”

“Mysterious ways.”The woman sobered after that however, that weird smile fading.“I’m offering my help, but only for one of your problems.You both want to get home – well, back to familiar space at least – and without knowing the precise locations of planets at this point in time all I can tell you is that you’re barely in the same cluster of galaxies as anything you know.Your path can be short and direct… or you can take the long way ‘round.A scenic tour of the universe, if you will.A little distraction before you find destiny.”

Sam looked up sharply, to catch the woman looking at her.“Destiny?” she asked, brow furrowed.“As in _the Destiny_?”

“I suppose there could only be one.”But that smile was back.

“You mean the Ancient ship.”

“I mean your destiny, dear,” she replied.“Whether or not that leads you to any ship isn’t something I know.But wherever it leads you, this little device will certainly point your way.But it will only lead you forward, or back.”

She held out the thing she’d been hiding in her hand.It was a small device, smaller than Sam’s palm.On the backside – at least she assumed it was the backside – there looked to be some kind of output port, like an alien USB, and on the front there was a button and a tiny screen.It was dark now.Curiously, she thumbed the button.Nothing happened.

“Not in here, and not until the both of you have decided what to do,” the woman said.Her eyes looked old, older than the rocks that surrounded them.“And take your time deciding.Haste has a way of causing problems later on down the road.”

*

Jack checked the time as he reached for the phone, and muttered darkly when he saw who it was that was calling at quarter of midnight.

“Daniel,” he said, “This had better be good.I was about to actually leave the office, and _you_ don’t have the excuse of being on another planet and not knowing the time zone equivalents.”

“ _Look, sorry to bother you Jack,_ ” his friend replied, “ _But I think we have a lead in our search for information about other nine-chevron addresses._ ”

“You mean there are more we can dial?”

“ _Well, maybe.Not exactly.But maybe.You see I was reading and encountered an Alteran report of an incident like the one that landed you and Sam in the Antarctic at the second Earth gate.And I started thinking, what if that same thing had happened to Sam?What if the address was the right one for the_ Destiny _, but at the last second there was a power surge and it jumped them to another gate nearby?_ ”

Jack swiveled back and forth in his chair.As far as he was concerned, that was one of the perks of being a general and having a desk job – the chairs were fun.“But the _Destiny_ was in between galaxies last I checked.”

“ _Yeah_ , _I know, and maybe that’s another part of why it might have jumped her.She could be anywhere behind or ahead of wherever the_ Destiny _is right now._ ”

“So… how does this help get her back?”

“ _I don’t know, but hey, at least we might have a place we can start looking, right_?”

Jack rubbed his face.Typical Daniel – while most of the idealism had faded over the years (a fact that Jack felt conflicted about; as much as he’d complained about it, he’d valued Daniel’s less trigger-happy input in situations) he figured that that kid who’d solved the problem of dialing the address to Abydos by looking at a newspaper would never truly leave.Besides, they were all worried about Sam.He’d talked to Teal’c earlier that day, filling him in on the situation even though there was nothing the Jaffa could really do, not when their own galaxy still had threats in it to mop up.The tension in Daniel’s voice stalled any snapping he could have done.

Still, it would have been nice to have an _idea_ of an answer.

“Better than we had before,” he said.“Keep looking, maybe you’ll turn up something else.”

“ _Sure thing, Jack._ ” A pause.“ _How’re you holding up?_ ”

“Carter doesn’t need me to lose my head over her,” Jack replied.“Besides, we’ve got our own investigation going.We’ve got the brains here being bossed around by that physicist that always irritated Sam, and we’ve got a manhunt going on for whoever was running things at that Tantalus base.Carter’s reports say she called herself…” Jack pushed pieces of paper around on his desk for a minute, coming up with the last report she sent before all hell had broken loose “…McDiarmuid.Some kind of rogue agent or something, from the IOA.”Jack made a face.“You’d think with all the bad luck that rogue agents had when encountering us they’d just give it up already.”

“ _You know there were a lot of people a few years ago who said we weren’t doing enough to save the people on the_ Destiny _._ ”

“And that we were just using them to find out more about the universe, see what the Ancients were investigating, yada yada,” Jack waved a hand tiredly.“People say a lot of stuff when you’re at this level.I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have.”

“ _I think we all thought that they weren’t going to do anything about it,_ ” Daniel said reassuringly.“ _Besides, with everything that was going on, when the people out there said they had it covered, we were more inclined to believe them.Between the Wraith and the Ori and everything else, it’s been… well, let’s just say I really miss going on missions, the four—_ “ a sound like a fist meeting a shoulder, and a sound of pain from Daniel “— _okay, the five of us going on missions together.We’ve all gone our separate ways now._ ”

“I know what you mean.”Jack shuffled the papers around his desk.Every time Sam was in here she’d set them all straight, organized into piles based on some scheme she had, but when she wasn’t around they fell into disarray again.“If we were all still a team we’d have been out there.”

“ _Jack, if you want to send me—_ “

Another voice cut in from the background.“ _And by ‘me’ he means ‘Vala and me’ because if Daniel thinks he is going on an adventure without me then he needs to think again—_ “

“— _Okay, if you want to send_ us _to find her, all you have to do is give us a way to do it._ ”

Jack was quiet for a long moment, long enough that he heard Daniel clear his throat and ask if he was all right.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.“I’ll let you know if anything comes up, or if I get any cute ideas.”

“ _Like taking a cargo ship and flying off to find Sam_?”

“Those kinds of cute ideas,” Jack confirmed.“But I think we might have enough work to do here trying to figure out how this McDiarmuid got all the information she did and why she blew up a planet.”

“ _All right.Keep in touch_.”

“You too.”

The line went dead after the click, and he slowly put the phone back in its cradle. Daniel had a point.If they hadn’t all gone their separate ways over the years, they’d be out there right now, finding another Icarus planet or some way to get a ship to head after Sam.The thought of her alone (well, maybe, but Jack preferred not to think what would happen if she was stuck with Ba’al wherever she was), hurt and far away, and all of them powerless to do anything to help her…

Lips pressed together, he packed up and left, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket.There wasn’t anything he could do right now, not until they knew more.But whatever information there was out there was buried deep.

“Better start digging,” he said to himself as he locked his office door.

*

“You don’t actually _believe_ her.”

Sam arched a brow at Ba’al across the room as she shrugged on her tac vest and dug through her pack, laying everything out carefully so she could once more take inventory of what she had to work with.“Well,” she replied.“I can’t say I haven’t heard stranger things, and even _you_ can’t disagree with that.”

Energy bars.Water purifier tablets. Emergency thermal blanket.Extra ammunition clips for the P90 which was still missing.First aid kit.A Goa’uld healing device she’d liberated from the armory on the base.Her tablet, and the little handheld scanner, and their radios.Ba’al was similarly equipped, except he had only a zat.She hadn’t trusted him with an actual gun… which was why she was surprised to see him adjusting a hand device when she turned around.

“Where the hell did you get that?” she demanded.Ba’al made a show of making sure the long metal part that wrapped around his arm wasn’t going to chafe.

“I found it,” he replied, smirking at her.

“Found it _where_?”

“In the armory, when you were rooting through drawers for something else.”

“And you still took the zat?”

He shrugged.“Best to have contingency plans.Trusting to one’s all-powerful knowledge and a history of running roughshod through whatever area of space desired did not end so well for the rest of my esteemed brethren, if I recall correctly.”He paused, and his smirk widened just a bit.“Did you expect me to ask permission?Your back was turned.”

Sam thought about trying to take it from him, then shrugged and gave in.He had a point, as much as she hated to admit it; those things packed a punch, and being Goa’uld, he was far better versed in its use than she was.Waving a hand at him, she packed up her bag and held it in place to clip it.“If you use that thing when you shouldn’t, I’ll shoot you.”

“I am warned,” he replied without an ounce of sincerity.

She had to re-pack his backpack – she supposed lessons on Megalomaniac Tendencies and Conquering And Enslaving Planets took precedence over how to efficiently pack.When they were both packed up Sam turned to face him.She’d been going over what she was going to say in her head while they packed, and locked eyes with Ba’al fearlessly.

“Look,” she said.“I know that saving people is _not_ your gig, but I’m going after the _Destiny_ , and—“

“I know,” Ba’al interrupted.“I also know you are quite incapable of handling the universe at large.”

Sam felt her momentum slipping, being replaced with irritation.“Excuse me?”

“You are inexperienced in the ways of the universe at large.”

“Oh, and _you_ know how things work in places you’ve never been?”

“There may also be the novelty of traveling to the edge of known space to find whatever it is the Ancients sent the _Destiny_ out to find.Whatever information it provides will be most valuable indeed.So you see, Colonel,” and he grinned.“My reasons are wholly selfish.”

His sudden capitulation made her narrow her eyes.“What are you up to, Ba’al?”

He spread his hands, affecting offense.“I cannot be genuinely interested in something without an ulterior motive?”Under her unimpressed glare, Ba’al just shrugged and shifted his shoulders under the pack.“I suppose fooling you thusly was worth a try.”

“I give it an E for effort,” Sam replied, and led the way back to where the woman was waiting, standing by the tunnel where she’d heard the rushing water before.It didn’t make her entirely comfortable to have an armed Ba’al at her back, but it could be worse, she reminded herself.It could be _any_ other Goa’uld.

“I take it the two of you have decided—here, something for the road,” the woman said, handing over a bag that chinked softly.“Surprisingly quickly, too; I’d have thought I would hear more yelling.Oh, well… that toy I gave you won’t activate until you’re well away from this planet, anyway.You have time to change your minds.”

“As it turns out, we’re agreeing on something for once, though not for the same reasons,” Sam answered before Ba’al could say something smart.She took the bag and tucked it away.

“Most are like that,” the woman replied, patting her arm.“Don’t worry about him.He’ll do something selfless when the time comes.”

Beside her, Ba’al narrowed his eyes, and Sam felt a jolt of surprise.“I think you’re mistaken about him,” she said, pushing hair out of her eyes where a gentle breeze had blown it in.“He’s not selfless at _all_.”

“That’s why it’ll be when the time comes, and not now,” the woman told her.“If you’re sure of your choice…”

The breeze picked up suddenly, from gentle to hard as the winds of a storm.It shouldn’t have been hard enough to push her, but it was, and suddenly Sam felt her feet leave the floor and fell backwards into the black.

This time, though, the fall didn’t end in darkness but in water.Sam hit the surface hard and came up gasping for air, fighting to keep her head above the roiling surface.The water was running swiftly, carrying her quickly away from the place where she could barely see the faintest flicker of light from the cavern.The pack, luckily, was waterproof, but it made swimming and maneuvering awkward, making her get caught in eddies and pushed back and forth.She slammed into one stalagmite, then another, and then felt a hand grab her arm and pull her in.

“Ba’al—“ Sam choked out around a mouthful of water.

“Hold on!” she heard, and reached out, gripping the back of his tac vest at the neck, and they were swept down the tunnel together.After what felt like an eternity of getting sucked into whirling sinks and slammed into rocks, there was suddenly more room to move.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, then mentally berated herself. _Something_ had been wrong since the minute they were launched onto this damn rock.

“Samantha,” she heard, accompanied by a sputtering cough.“The current—“

“I know,” she shouted back over the roar of the water, and let go to paddle arm’s-length away.“It’s getting stronger, and—I can see light ahead!”She put it all together in her head.“Waterfall!”

Sure enough they shot out the end of the tunnel into bright sunlight, flying out in the most terrifying moment of Sam’s life before she remembered her training and got into the proper position, arms crossed and legs straight.The fall seemed to last an absurdly long time, and Sam caught herself wondering if gravity was less than Earth standard, because it seemed to—

And then she hit the water.

Everything was blue on blue on tan, churning water made turbid by stirred-up sand.She couldn’t see Ba’al, she couldn’t tell where the surface was until her butt hit the sandy bottom. Lungs burning, Sam got her feet under her and kicked upward.As soon as she hit the surface she drew in a huge breath, getting her bearings as she swam toward the edge of the pool.The sand soaked up the water not too far away from where the waterfall dumped out, creating a gentle slope.

Off to her right she heard splashing, and when she’d managed to crawl on shaky limbs onto the crescent of damp sand around the edge, Sam looked over to see Ba’al, as bedraggled as a kitten in a bath, hauling out beside her.They both lay panting in inch-deep water.

“Hey,” she said at last.“We’re alive.”

Ba’al coughed, and a little bit of water dribbled out.“Your powers of observation grow daily, Colonel,” he replied.Maybe if he hadn’t looked like a drowned rat, she would have felt the intended bite.

“You look like a drowned rat,” Sam told him, and laughed at the scowl.

*

If the Ancient database had been a book, Daniel would have thrown it across the room in irritation by now.Storming away from the terminal and shoving the door open was the closest thing, so he did that, going to lean on the railing and look out toward the city.

San Francisco was barely visible; the fog that it was known for had come in thick, but every now and then he could catch a glimpse of the Transamerica building poking up.Mostly he got the impression of a haze of light, though, glowing golden from the streetlamps and blurring across the Golden Gate all the way to the black hulks of the Marin headlands.Sounds were strangely amplified in the fog, enough that Daniel imagined he could hear the noise of the city from far out here, and the lapping of the waves on the piers of Atlantis seemed louder than it ought to be.It was chilly, though, and Daniel pulled his jacket closed as he felt beads of moisture condensing on his skin.The wind at least cooled his frustration some.

He wanted to help Sam, wherever she was if she was still alive – no, she _was_ still alive, there had been too many times to count where one of them had been thought dead and the others hadn’t given up, Daniel wasn’t going to do that either.He wanted to figure out the mysteries of the nine-chevron addresses, determine their significance and how much the Ancients had known when they’d sent _Destiny_ out into the universe.He wanted to get that pinched, exhausted look off Jack’s face – they’d been friends so long it was hard to see.Maybe after all this was done, too, Jack and Sam could finally figure out what they wanted from each other.Traveling around in space had that odd effect on people.

“Daniel?”

He hadn’t heard Vala come out onto the terrace, but now she was next to him, a hand on his arm.Daniel tried to smile for her.

“I thought you were off causing trouble with Sheppard, or asleep.It’s late.”

“Asleep?When there are so many interesting things here?”Vala smiled broadly for a moment, then sobered.She always surprised him still, showing that beneath her bubbly exterior there was a thoughtful person.“I brought you food, I know you forget to eat when you get like this.When you weren’t in the room I went looking for you.”She stepped in closer, leaning against him a little and looking out toward the city.“What are you doing out here?”

“I’m getting nowhere,” Daniel replied.“I haven’t found _any_ thing that could help us.Every time I think I’m getting close to something it turns out to be a dead end.”

“Well, the archives _are_ large, you know…”

“No, no, this goes beyond that.The Ancients we know are vague on purpose because they’re Ascended, but I seriously doubt they would hide something in some totally obscure place in the Archives, regardless of what kind of information it was.It’s like they didn’t even know addresses other than the one for _Destiny_ existed.”

“Maybe they didn’t know.”

“We’re talking about the Ancients here, the race that built the Stargate system in the first place.If they don’t know, who would?”

“It seems to me that if there was more than one nine-chevron address, one that didn’t lead to the ship, don’t you think they could have, I don’t know, written it down somewhere?”

Daniel stared at her.“Written it _down_?”

“You know, to remember.”Vala shrugged, still leaning against him.“Even if they didn’t know, or did and just conveniently forgot to put it in their Archives that contain their accumulated knowledge, just because you can’t find a record of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

Daniel had a retort all prepared, ready to deliver, but it died on his tongue a moment later, and he fell into thoughtfulness.Vala, sensing something was different, tilted her head to look up at him.

“Daniel?”

“What did you just say?”

Confused, Vala pursed her lips a moment.“Just because you can’t find something doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Daniel ran a hand through his hair, slowly.How could he have been so stupid?

“Is there something wrong…?”

“No, no, you’re brilliant, Vala.”

Somewhat taken aback, Vala nonetheless smiled a little.“Well, thanks, I always knew.”

Daniel pulled away, heading back into the room, a smile starting to spread across his face.At last, he had somewhere to look.

*

The waterfall was a darker smudge of rock below the lip of the wall by the first time she glanced back, and Sam couldn’t see the cave exit at all.That put her more at ease, somewhat; ever since they’d put themselves back in order and struck out from the waterfall pool, she’d had the feeling they were being watched.It wasn’t a pleasant feeling at all, and she could tell by the tension in Ba’al’s shoulders that he was on edge too.

 _Of course he’s on edge_ , Sam thought. _We’re millions of light-years from anything we know.The only reason_ I _haven’t lost it is because_ he’s _here._

Not for the first time, she brushed her fingers over the pouch on her vest that held the tiny device. _It can lead you forward, or back,_ the woman had said.

“Just who do you think she was?” Sam asked, more as a way to pass the time than anything.She wasn’t really eager to find out; chances were good the woman was just someone with some esoteric bit of technology that she thought could foretell the future or something like that.Like all the others like her Sam had encountered over the years.

“Some madwoman, doubtless.I would compare her to that librarian I am given to understand was on the planet with the Sangraal, but as he was actually Adria, that point is not a very strong one.”

Sam looked at him.“I thought that _you_ that came with us was a clone.How do you know what happened?”

Ba’al just smirked at her.“I have my ways.”

She spent a while trying to get out of him how he knew, but her heart wasn’t in it, and Ba’al was a master of evasive statements.They had more pressing concerns, anyway.They’d come too far from the gate to turn back, and Sam still wanted to find some way to orient herself to wherever they were.Finding a ship in the (probably) spaceport she’d seen might not be the best way to do that, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t stolen ships before.Besides, a ship would have navigational charts (or so she assumed), which would mean a way to plot a course to… where?How did they even begin looking for one ship in an entire universe?

They were at the city by midafternoon.Calling it a city was generous; really it was more of a large town, mostly given over to landing pads, which she could see housed fantastical ships the likes of which Sam had never seen before.It looked like they ran the gamut of sizes too, from one-man fighter types of ships to huge transports not much smaller than the _Daedalus_ -class ships, rumbling overhead like spacefaring C-17s, bound for the larger landing areas on the outskirts.Even more fantastic were the beings wandering the main drag that also ran the gamut of sizes and shapes, and that was only what she could see without being too obvious about gawking.There were small ones, tall ones, round ones, ones with too many arms, ones with _no_ arms…

It was difficult not to stare at them, and difficult not to notice that they were being stared at too, even though after so many years of encountering different peoples through gate travel.Either way, they’d been pegged for outsiders.Sam just hoped it wouldn’t mean more trouble for them.

“I assume you have a plan,” Ba’al hissed into ear as they walked.

“Sure do,” Sam murmured in reply as she steered them into a likely-looking doorway.Bar entrances were apparently as easy to recognize in this part of the universe as anywhere.“Wing it.”

“ _That_ is your plan?”

“Just follow my lead,” she replied.“We need to find out a few things before we can go anywhere.”

The bar was dimly lit, but Sam still could tell that every eye in the place turned to them the moment they walked in.The uncomfortable sensation of being sized up increased a hundredfold… then dissolved, as the beings in the bar turned back to their drinks.No threat, not yet anyway.Sam let out a breath.

“Now,” she whispered, “We’re just going to sit down, have a few drinks, and ask some questions as casually as we can.”She’d figured the disc-like things in the pouch she’d been given were money, and by watching out of the corner of her eye was able to pay for two drinks that turned out to be hideously strong and disgusting.

“You have _no_ idea what you are doing,” Ba’al told her with a sneer.

“Oh, and _you_ do?”

He just smirked at her, sliding off his seat.“ _Touchy_ , Colonel.I suggest you watch and learn.”Collecting his drink, he vanished into the crowd of patrons.Sam just put her head in her hands.The drink had made her head pound, and she really wasn’t in any mood to deal with him right now.

After half an hour wherein he had not rematerialized, Sam slammed her palms on the bar and got up.She was in the middle of _nowhere_ on some unknown planet, she’d had some weird experience with a weird would-be prophet that lived in a cave in the wilderness, she’d been pushed out a waterfall, and now she’d lost track of a System Lord – a _former_ System Lord, but he certainly didn’t act any different – in a bar in some strange spaceport.Knowing Ba’al, he’d slipped out a back door, he could be halfway to hyperspace by now and she wouldn’t stand a chance of catching him…

A hand grabbed her arm.“Hey there, female,” a grating voice behind her said.“Lemme buy you another drink.”

Great, now she had to deal with drunken aliens, too.Not wanting to cause a scene, confident she could take on whatever cretin it was that had just picked the wrong woman to mess with, Sam turned around… to face three of the biggest humanoids she’d seen.The rocklike appearance of their skin only made them look bigger… and the fact they had an extra pair of limbs didn’t help, either.

“I’ve had some, thanks,” she replied, trying to let only a hunt of disgust into her voice. _Guess that pickup line’s really universal._

“Wasn’t a question,” another one growled.He held a violently red drink out to her.Sam turned her head away, pulling her arm free.

“I said, I don’t want—“

“—to bother you,” a third voice cut in, an arm settling around her waist.“This one’s mine, I’m afraid.”

The three rocky aliens eyed Ba’al contemptuously.“You think you can hog all the girls, offworlder?” one asked.“We were just being friendly.Besides, we don’t take orders from your kind.”

“Go be friendly with someone else,” Ba’al replied.Sam could hear the malice in his voice, an edge that was clear when he spoke in the metallic flange of the symbiote.“She’s mine.”

As his eyes flashed, the three aliens slunk away, and Sam shrugged Ba’al’s arm off her as fast as she could.“The _fuck_?”

“Sadly, we’ve no time for that.We have to go now; I will tell you your answers on the way.”

“How…”Sam glanced behind him and saw a crowd of women – at least they looked to be women – waving sadly at Ba’al as they left the bar, and snapped her glare back to him.“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a total pig?”

“Insults haven’t changed in two thousand years.Now, if we could get down to business?”

Still glaring, Sam jerked farther away from him.Smugness practically radiated off Ba’al, and she didn’t want any part of it.Maybe this one needed a punch too.

“Okay,” she said.“So what information did you learn from your spaceport floozies?”

*

Jack put the report back on his desk.It was typical Daniel work – too long (in his opinion anyway), prone to tangents, the conclusions of it all buried in there somewhere.But the point here hadn’t been to entertain, it had been to find certain information, and…

“This is all… very _interesting_ ,” he said, leaning on his elbows.“But what you were getting at must have been lost on me.”

Daniel eyed him from across the desk.“You got bored,” he said.

“I got bored.”Jack sighed.“I don’t get how any of this helps us find Carter.”

“Well, I didn’t find any other gate addresses, but then Vala helped me realize that maybe this is something the Ancients _didn’t_ know about the gates they were seeding in all the other galaxies that they thought the _Destiny_ was going to go to.They meant to simply send it ahead, occasionally gate in to see how it was doing or something, and then go back to using the normal seven and eight chevron addresses within one or two galaxies.They never intended to use more than the one nine chevron address.”

“…you’re saying that the Ancients, those… pesky, enigmatic benignly neglectful beings that like to appear whenever they want and speak in riddles and _build the Stargate system_ , didn’t know this about the gates?”

“Well, maybe they just didn’t know it had that property,” Daniel argued, gesturing with his coffee cup.It was seven in the morning, and he’d been beamed via one of the ships in orbit directly from Atlantis to Homeworld Command.“They didn’t think any attempt to dial to _Destiny_ would come under the kind of circumstances that Sam must have been under when she was trying to escape.”

Jack stared at the report, closed the folder over it.“Why couldn’t she have just let herself be beamed out?” he muttered.

“When have you known any one of us to do something the easy way?”

“Good point.”Jack shook his head.“Look, it just sounds silly that the people who built the gates didn’t know everything there is to know.”

“If they knew they didn’t write it down, and considering the archives contain the weirdest scraps of information in them that you could possibly think of, but not something having to do with their greatest development…”Daniel trailed off, gesturing with his mug.“It doesn’t add up, Jack.”

“So we’re back to square one.”

“I still think there’s something to that idea of the wormhole jumping.I don’t think that Sam dialed a nine chevron address by herself, because they were close enough to several planets that she could have gotten help from.She wouldn’t have known to do it.”

“That’s saying something.”Jack shuffled some papers around, automatically taking up the carafe and refilling both their mugs.“I’ll see if we can get Doctor McKay to work out some way of maybe giving us sort of an _idea_ where she could have gone.I’m sure there’s something he can figure out with math and physics and… pretty pictures.Want some breakfast?”He rose, and after draining his cup again Daniel did too.“I’ve got stars on my shoulders now, that means the food is decent.”

“Sometimes I almost miss the mystery foods they served back on the base, though.”

“Strangely enough,” Jack replied, “So do I.We’ll both be able to think more clearly with food in our stomachs, and then just maybe we’ll finally be able to stop our questions from breeding more questions.”

*

Ba’al talked as they walked, glancing at the lettering on the sides of the landing pads they passed.“The name of this planet is Kasheesha; most of the bigger settlements are farther north, but the spaceports near the equator are where the best money is made.I could have had any one of them, you know.”

Sam glowered at him.“I’m sure there are venereal diseases that can even get through a Goa’uld-powered immune system.”

“Possible, but highly unlikely.”Ba’al stopped in front of one ‘pad, considering the panel beside the entryway, glowing red above a set of keys with alien symbols etched on them.“Obviously, the most intriguing tidbit I got out of their giggly, empty little heads was the location of a ship we might find useful wherever we’re going.”After another moment, he tapped in a set of symbols.The panel lit green, the door opened, and with a pleased expression, Ba’al swanned through.Sam rolled her eyes and followed him.

“So what unfortunate souls are going to be out a ship?” she asked.

“Remember those three brutes that attempted to make you their nubile plaything?”

“This is _their_ ship?”Sam gave the sleek craft a long, measuring look.She’d somehow expected those three cretins to have something held together with gum and hope, but this looked decent, at least from the outside.Not as big as the transports, but definitely big enough for both of them.

“I would hurry, Colonel,” Ba’al called out to her.“There’s no telling when the rightful owners will come looking for their way off this hellish planet, and I would much rather be far away from here when they do.”

Sam ignored him and took a walk around the outside of the ship, admiring it.It reminded her of a smaller version of the _Aurora_ -class Ancient ships; the general hull shape was the same.There were four smaller and two bigger engine outlets on the back end, and the bow tapered to – she guessed – the cockpit.At least, she could see the glint of a viewport.

She returned to the boarding ramp, which was still raised, and found Ba’al frowning at a panel he’d pried open.“What, your ladies didn’t give you the means to actually get into the ship?” she asked, voice saccharine.Ba’al glared at her.

“I doubt they knew it would require a command code.This requires your tablet, it would seem.”

Still smiling, Sam pulled out the device and hooked up the ports, slotting them onto the strangely familiar clear panels.“Guess Ancient technology made it out here… though this program language is the same as in the DHD.Just different enough that it’ll be a problem getting the door open.”

“If you don’t think it capable…”

“Oh, it’s capable.”Sam pulled the stylus out and began tapping away at the screen.“We should really conserve this thing’s battery though.I doubt anywhere in this part of space has a plug I could charge it at.”

“Do you always carry on this way?You spend too much time around Qetesh.”

“Vala.Her name is _Vala_.”Sam suspected he knew that quite well and always had, but preferred to use her other name to stir things up.It seemed like the kind of thing he would do.

Ba’al waved a hand.“Whatever her name is.”

Sam glanced over as she worked.“You know, I find it hard to believe you want to travel to the back end of nowhere of the universe with someone you hold so much contempt for.”

“The benefits to me outweigh any irritation you will cause on the way.As far as company goes, you are almost pleasant, compared to others I could be with.”

“High praise,” she muttered, poking at commands on the tablet.“This ramp’s going to be tricky…”

Ba’al suddenly tensed.“I suggest you try to engage all of your brain cells, Colonel,” he said, and Sam was startled to hear the flange back in his voice.She’d almost gotten used to the ‘normal’ human one.“We are not going to be alone much longer.”

Sam turned – just in time to see the rock aliens walk through the landing bay door.Sam hunched as close to the hull as she could, working double time, doing her best to ignore the shouts and the sound of Ba’al firing the hand device.It seemed to slow them down, at least, from what she could see; the shield in it shimmered around him, and he was between her and the aliens.She had that much cover at least.

Waiting for a command to execute, Sam worked her P90 free and held it up so Ba’al could see it.“Here!Try not to shoot up the hull!”

Ba’al caught the weapon and fired it with his other hand.His arm was remarkably steady… but it was still a relief when the ramp hissed open and lowered, and he tossed the gun back to her.After what had happened at the SGC, she didn’t trust him with a gun where she couldn’t keep all her attention on him.

Slamming the panel shut after pulling her tablet free, Sam leapt onto the ramp and skidded inside, running toward where she thought the cockpit probably was.She heard Ba’al’s boots on the ramp and a slap of flesh on metal as he hit what must have been the ramp control.

The cockpit was bigger than she thought, more of a bridge, but Sam couldn’t spare the time to glance around as she seated herself before the pilot’s controls.It was split-yoke, not something she’d seen used.Dropping the tablet on top of her pack, Sam grasped the controls.Immediately the board began to light up in response, more things coming online as Ba’al sat in the copilot’s chair.

“I don’t mean to alarm you, Colonel,” he said as dryly as he could, “But I don’t think they’re amenable to our borrowing their ship.”

“Shut up and help me figure out how to get this thing off the ground!”

The controls were in the same odd Ancient – she supposed it could be _ancient_ Ancient, but either way she didn’t have a clue what anything was.But gauging by the _kinds_ of controls, she could put a few things together.Grasping a sliding control that reminded her of a throttle, Sam pushed it forward.The engines whined as they revved up, but they didn’t lift off the ground.

“There,” Ba’al said, reaching across to point at five smaller sliders on the wide control board.“Repulsors, to get us off the ground.”

Sam reached forward and pushed those up, and to her delight the ship began to rise – ponderously, but it was leaving the landing bay.When they’d cleared the lip of the barrier wall, Sam tried the throttle-like controls again, and the engines roared satisfyingly as the ship moved forward.

“Okay,” she muttered.“Let’s see if these controls are universal…”

She pulled back on the yokes, and smiled as the nose tilted up and they headed up into the atmosphere.Ba’al grabbed the throttles and pushed them forward all the way, and Sam was pressed back into the seat almost painfully.

 _There have to be inertial dampeners on this thing_ , she thought giddily, the high-G burn making it difficult to think that far, blacking out her vision.Dimly she saw a hand reaching for another dial on the control board and the effects of the Gs lessened, until she could feel the thrust of the engines but wasn’t near to blacking out because of it.Good thing, too, because twin explosions on their flank made warning whistles start up.

“We’ve got company!” Sam shouted, twisting the ship into an evasive maneuver.They were still in atmosphere; though it was thin up here it was still enough to create a golden-red halo around the windows and drag against the hull.She fought the controls, praying they had shields of some kind… and that when they hit space, they had _hyperdrive_.

“Weapons are—“

“Forget about the weapons!” Sam said, watching the sky darken from navy blue to black as they blasted upward.“Find the hyperdrive controls and get us out of here!”

“Where?”

Sam whipped them into a roll, dodging more fire from the two fighter-type ships in pursuit.“ _Anywhere!_ ”The ship, really too large to be this acrobatic, groaned around them.

Out of the corner of her eye Sam watched him lean in toward a holographic display that popped up, scanning a quickly scrolling list before jabbing his finger at one of the choices.If this had been any other situation she’d have died before demanding to know where it was he’d chosen for them to go, but given what was going on, she had no choice but to trust Ba’al not to send them somewhere where he’d potentially get into trouble he couldn’t get himself out of.Not that either of them could know what places meant trouble, not out here.

The console pinged, and Sam took her hands off the controls as they jerked forward, accelerating into the hyperspace window and leaving their pursuers far, far behind.

 


End file.
